eli5: How do online petitions work? Are they effective?
In: Technology
A bunch of people “sign” a petition asking for X thing to happen, by basically upvoting it. Then the person they are attempting to get a response from either responds to it, or they don’t.
In general they’re not effective. Change.org for example has had very successful petitions that either get completely ignored, or gets a response of basically “no, we won’t be doing that”.
The problem is that it takes 2 seconds to sign an online petition, and things that require low effort often don’t correlate to a strong conviction/willingness to back it up. Politicians are only scared into action by things that might cost them votes, and companies are only scared of things that could cost them money.
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